AKA they're doing what every other aerospace company has been doing for decades, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization [0] with simulation in the loop. If you were to ask them how they're leveraging Design of Experiments I bet it'd be met with "design of what?".
In standard constraint optimization you know the constraints at compile time. In MDO many constraints are generated at runtime and constantly change as you search for solutions.
In MDAO you definitely know all the constraints at compile time, but inequality constraints can be active or inactive as the optimizer progresses.
That's how SNOPT, IPOPT, presumably KNITRO and nonlinear programming optimizers work.
Yes MDAO is "just" constrained nonlinear optimization.
You come up with a model for your thing, which often involves multiple "disciplines" like mass, propulsion, aerodynamics, loads, trajectory/equations of motion, and then usually use some framework to calculate the constraints values and objective value and their gradients
> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range.
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats and are about overcharging for a little extra legroom and service rather than trading off operational flexibility for unique luxury though. Big difference between charging 3x economy rates for 2x the space for a carefully estimated proportion of seats in a mixed configuration (no brainer) and hoping your layout is so good it justifies thirstier, less flexible aircraft to operators (tough sell)...
That said, Boom's customers - if they ever exist - will be a new business class pay extra for supersonic flights category anyway.
> Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats
Most of the profit on a plane is made in business class. If airlines could fly an all-business configuration, they would. The problem is the smallest planes that can do high-paying routes like LON-NYC are bigger than that customer set. So the airline throws in economy seats, often barely breaking even on those, to fill space.
In a world with small airliner planes that can make those transoceanic and transcontinental journeys, I suspect we’ll see more all-business class flights.
Smaller jet aircraft on the same route generally means relatively expensive operating costs: some costs like landing slots and pilots are essentially fixed, whilst others like maintenance, fuel and capital costs don't scale down linearly. The marginal profit on an individual economy class seat might be small, but 100+ of them cover a large portion of the fixed and semi-fixed costs of operating the aircraft, and are relatively easy to fill.
Long range business jets which can comfortably accommodate a typical narrowbody business class cabin exist: nobody is certifying them for all-business class scheduled flights because it wouldn't be profitable to do so; likewise the all-premium 32 seat A318 configuration hasn't been adopted anywhere except the NYC/LON route it didn't really have the range for because it wouldn't be profitable elsewhere. Boom's bet is that supersonic changes that.
Landing charges levied on each landing usually have a significant weight component (amongst other variable components like emissions, noise, handling and passenger charges) but the relationship usually isn't linear with passenger capacity. Landing slots required at busier airports to have the right to land at a certain time each week are generally traded between airlines with the slot coordinator's agreement with the value of the slot based mainly on the commercial attractiveness of the time slot.
There is one airline that flies all business class. An A321Neo with 76 lie-flat seats, NYC to Paris/Nice/Milan. Random date selection yields $2700 one-way New York to Paris.
But that's just it - the airlines have finally (lol) realized that a huge price "Delta" (lolx2) between normal cattle class and first class was a mistake.
People aren't usually paying 4x for first, but they will pay $10 more for Y, $30 for Z, etc.
The future of airlines is fully adjustable planes!
Huh. Where? I work for a company that's not a FAANG but $200B market cap, and what we get through Concur, Spotnana is at most, 5, occasionally 10% below what I see for the same fare class on Expedia. I have never seen anything approaching 20% cheaper, let alone 50%.
It isnt a trend. This is marketing. Thirty years ago, the a380 was pitched as having room for luxury too. The new plane is always going to have more legroom, wider aisles and better air conditioning than anything before. But it never happens. The pitch to actual operators is the square-feet of floorspace and how many seats can be crammed into that space at given price points. Just like concord, this thing only makes sense with quazi-economy seating. Do not expect to nap on a nice lie-flat seat.
Saw a Jet Blue plane wrapped in Peacock livery today… selling the planes themselves as billboards sure does feel like scraping the bottom of the revenue barrel.
To be fair, modern airliners, even budget ones, are way more comfortable than Concorde. You can visit one in a museum, it's very cramped, and noisier. Concorde had way better service tho.
Forget luxury. Forget speed. Hands down, the best flying experience I've ever had was on a dirty, slow, late and loud C-130. After an announced delay on the ground, I wedged myself between a cargo pallet and the wall, threw a ratchet strap across as a "belt" and passed out on a metal floor with a backpack for a pillow. No in-flight meals. No safety briefs. No entertainment systems. No drink service. Nothing. I don't even remember the takeoff. The only thing anyone said to me was "Uh, sir... We are about to land. You have to get up." THAT is what I want from flying. Give me a bit of peace, a chance to sleep, and I couldn't care less how fast or slow the journey.
I know it's due to safety but I really wish there were an economy version of the lie flat seat. I'd gladly sleep in a set of bunk beds stacked 3-4 high for an 8 hour flight.
Of if you are on Air New Zealand and can't afford business class you can get a Skycouch in Economy. They're pretty great, actually, unless you're over 6ft tall or can't sleep with you knees bent a bit
Are you kidding? On a commercial flight, between the safety briefs, seatbelt warnings, and "turn on/off your devices" there are constant announcements. And the stupid entertainment systems you cannot turn off, or at least that spring to flashing life again after each pointless announcement. I wore my ear defenders on united once, and was woken mid-flight by a steward informing me they were not allowed as i wouldnt be able to hear announcements.
> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people
This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
I work in aerospace and I don't find this development strategy unusual prima facie. I don't know if Boom is explicitly doing rapid spiral development, but this is what it would look like from the outside - a development vehicle that doesn't resemble the final vehicle design in many ways, but does have strategically selected commonality to validate and buy down risk on specific subsystems and operational concepts. They may be retiring XB-1 simply because they got the data they needed.
That being said, I share your skepticism of Boom as a company. As far as I know, they still don't have an engine for their production aircraft design.
The demonstrator was to validate some basic concepts they were promoting about being able to achieve supersonic flight without supersonic booms. It achieved that at relatively low cost, and gave them something to brag about, an indication of baseline competence at certifying airframes and possibly ticked off some investor boxes. There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform, so its not surprising they haven't gone to the expense of continuing to fly it. It's not going to be useful for most other stuff they might want to test, apart from perhaps their intended custom engines which are probably years away from being certified for flight tests, never mind hitting performance and reliability targets.
> There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform,
This is key to me.
I'm a layman in Aviation, so I'll unpack that.
The Boom XB-1 demonstrator (1) uses GEJ85: the General Electric J85 engines, as seen on military jets (2).
This is not the desired production jet's "Symphony" engine (3), which at a guess has to be both larger and more efficient?
So whatever is to be learned from the demonstrator, it doesn't tell us much about the final engine design.
In fact, all I know about this desired engine, is that Rolls-Royce isn't making it. (4)
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house? If they're making good progress, why are we hearing about how they're replacing excel as a design tool.
As I said in the other comment:
I'm not an expert, but this seems like the engine is on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure. i.e. Without engines, they have nothing but a glider.
And if Rolls-Royce thinks that it's either not technically or commercially feasible, then who can do it?
It seems developing a new engine a relatively rare, difficult, expensive, and risky endeavor in aviation. Notice none of the aircraft companies make their own, right? It's CFM, PW, and RR.
But Boom has a bunch of propulsion engineer openings so it looks like they're really going for it.
The saying in aviation is "don't develop a new airframe and a new powerplant at the same time".
Sure there are counterexamples, but they have good reasons to think that this is more than double the difficulty of developing one of these parts. And that the engine will take longer.
I wonder what kind of liability it would be to sell a one-off prototype plane like that. Guessing it would also have more value has a model in the lobby or on a pole outside headquarters one day than they would earn in selling it.
My take is that they felt like they were already pushing their luck with the prototype and didn't want to scare investors away when it inevitably crashed.
I share your skepticism, especially with their timeline. It has been some time since I looked at them closely, but they originally pitched developing their own supersonic capable turbofan to power their eventual production model. Especially with such a small team that seemed overly ambitious to me.
Hah.... in the back of my mind: announce they're going to crash it before the fly it.
"This flight we're validating our model by pushing the real world to the limit. It should explode about 38s into the test and crash. We've cleared the expected area"
The market for Boom is not commercial passenger flights. So much time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc. that the flight speed is not a big deal. Existing commercial passenger jets could already go faster without going supersonic and save some time, but it doesn't matter. Even if you fly commercial passenger jets at the absolutely face-melting Mach 3.3 of the SR-71, you don't really save enough time to matter. The maximum speed in flight doesn't do anything to address ground delays.
> time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc.
Airlines can optimise for this. Digital ID virtually eliminates security lines. Paying up for gate, t/o and landing spots takes care of the latter. There is a cost tradeoff for service in the airline business. An all-business airline flying Booms would almost necessarily have to pay up to negate these issues. (That or fly out of the FBO terminal.)
You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money. It doesn't matter, unless you're going to make flights from nowhere to nowhere. Doesn't sound like a business strategy to me.
Participation in a program does not dictate whether any specific passenger or non-specific passenger can get through TSA in any fixed amount of time. TSA may unilaterally impose any security measures upon any passenger of a commercial flight and may also unilaterally prohibit any passenger from boarding a commercial flight.
> And in some cases, the airlines have substantial control—Delta One has a separate security line at JFK.
I'm actually surprised more airports don't have VIP level gates that the airlines can pay a premium for allowing them to charge a premium to their passengers. It'd be interesting to see where the price could be that would guarantee enough passengers willing to pay the premium for much reduced airport headaches.
There’s probably a classist risk to this (recall the uproar over the residential building in NYC that had separate entrances for different unit classes), let alone the logistics are needed at whole-airport level to support it which is difficult to retrofit.
Just build an entirely different terminal instead of shoeing it into the same building as the terminals for the plebes. Out of sight, out of mind.
The classist risk is already there with the pricing they have for first class seats. By making first class only planes, you can have economy only planes like Spirit. Then nobody would be complaining about first class since nobody would see first class. I see no downsides with this concept!
Ah, I was referring to loading the same plane from different gates, which I’ve been told exists at some airports (boarding from business/first lounge one floor above the standard gate)
That's what you would consider classist? How about a lavatory for use only for first class. How about "closing" off the first class part of the plane with a little curtain? None of this suggests to me the airlines are trying to not be classist
> You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money.
I was once on a short internal US flight. We recognised an "elder statesman" politician, a Senator who owned property in the area of the city that we were going to.
He was seated at the front, and was given the opportunity to leave the aircraft a minute before anyone else - no luggage beyond a briefcase. Of course, by the time we deplaned he was nowhere to be seen, by then he was likely in the back his car already. Who needs a separate gate when the VIP can be guided through ahead of the rest, through some usually-closed door?
That may be true for domestic coast-to-coast flights, but not for transoceanic ones across the Atlantic, or especially the Pacific, or north-south across hemispheres, that can take 8+ hours. Flight time is a higher portion of the total travel time in those cases, and seems like the main market for Boom, especially if they initially target Business Class flyers who do those kinds of trips regularly.
Boom XB-1 did 750 mph air speed. If I've got an 8 hour flight at 561 mph in an A380 that's a reduction to 5.984 hours when I move to the Boom XB-1. Who cares about saving 1.1 hours on a transatlantic flight. There is a reason why Concorde's cruise speed was 1,341 mph.
So when Boom makes a commercial airliner that hits 1000+ mph with the same availability and turnaround time as a typical passenger plane then I'll pay attention. Until then, it's for rich people who can buy their own plane.
It's also largely PR guff. The first privately-developed supersonic aircraft was the Northrop N-156F, forerunner of the F-5, that first flew in 1959. Funded entirely from company funds with no military contract. And it went supersonic in its first flight with no drama.
In fact the chase plane for the Boom XB-1 is a T-38, derived from the N-156F. It can outrun the XB-1.
I'm not sure how strictly privately developed the N-156F is given you could easily argue that reuse of design, knowledge and relationships from existing contracts saved them a lot of money.
I think part of it was that they were testing a new aerodynamic design that eliminates or minimizes sonic boom, so they can go supersonic over land almost immediately after takeoff, and operate over populated land routes. It makes sense to test that kind of thing with the smallest possible model first, then see if you can scale it up to passenger size without losing that quiet acceleration. Their timeline for doing that may be optimistic, but what they're doing makes sense.
The XB-1 doesn't have any boom reduction shaping. That's the NASA X-59, though that aircraft is pretty much a dead-end in that it's not scalable to a passenger configuration.
The XB-1 made use of an atmospheric trick to minimise boom propagation to ground level on one test flight, so well-known in fact that Concorde sometimes used it to accelerate as it coasted-out without an audible ground-level boom. Unfortunately that trick runs out at about M1.17.
> At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI.
As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job.
As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
I listened to the podcast that the founder did about a week ago. It reminded me of how retired folks in the middle class open a restaurant when they don't know anything about running a restaurant. Except this dude isn't investing $1M on a McDonalds, he's investing hundreds of millions.
He seemed almost proud of his inexperience, and nearly said that it gave him an "advantage" because existing engineers weren't willing to "innovate."
This is a common story in the startup world. Outsiders are able to break free from the mould; its harder to innovate when everything you do is already shaped by best practices, and your career is highly dependent on your peers’ approval. Doing things differently is a high risk move that few are willing to make.
Incidentally, Ray Kroc, the guy who made McDonalds the $200B company it is today, didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. His closest experience was selling blenders.
> We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance.
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
Boom’s potential customers wouldn’t be able to put more seats on their planes even if they want to. I suppose the targeted performance affords very little margin for customization
Anyone know what their simulation stack might be using? From the modest amount I know, mechanical engineering usually dislike their CAD tool and Ansys FEA simulations don't always converge. So how on earth are they simulating an entire aircraft with a single command?
When they say simulate, so they actually mean just using ideal mathematical models in Matlab?
I work in this space. Most likely it is a huge conglomeration of commercial CFD, FEA, and CAD softwares, custom in-house codes, and empirical aircraft design curves all stitched together with some python.
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary, because everything a wind tunnel test could tell you can be predicted via simulation.
Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
Computational simulations have been involved in aircraft design for decades. However, at some point you still have to verify the simulations with real world tests. I think (as a non-expert) the main reason no aerodynamically novel aircraft have been developed lately is because we have essentially optimised designs, already. To be clear, I am not saying that we can't do better. I am saying that the manufacturing (and other) cost of incremental improvements is large and the benefit is small. For commercial aircraft (as an example only), it is really hard to beat a tube with wings for the lowest cost of moving large numbers of people or volumes of cargo. Military aircraft with specialised roles are a bit more varied, and a lot more expensive to build and fly.
I think there's also a lot of "if we don't change too much, we have a pretty good chance to not face issues getting the aircraft certified", and "if we change the aircraft too much it'll cause issues where airports have to alter their infrastructure" (which is relevant for things like the blended wing research that's popped up recently).
There's a ton of legacy in overall airline/aircraft operations that discourages big changes.
It happens every now and again on here: someone comes up with like a 2% improvement in aerodynamics, and people are unimpressed. Meanwhile airlines are basically scrambling to get it rolled into their next-gen purchases because it's the biggest improvement in costs in a decade.
You cannot possibly know that without knowing the operational lifetime of a plane and it's expected return. An airline doesn't buy a plane planning to break even on the purchase cost, for example.
Setting aside that you pulled that number out of your ass to argue against it, if something produces 400X it's purchase cost over it's operational life time, a 2% improvement takes that to 408X it's purchase cost for only a 2X increase in initial outlay, meaning it pays for itself 4 fold.
But very few innovations have that sort of effect on manufacturing cost to start with.
"It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people—compared to the hundreds or even thousands that would have been employed by a traditional big aerospace company. And we did this with roughly a tenth of the budget that would traditionally be required. People have marveled at how our small team of just 50 people at Boom designed, built, and successfully flew the XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. And we did this with about a tenth the capital as any other supersonic program."
Is the repetition a sign of AI writing the article?
Looks like investors and potential employees are asking if Boom is fast growth tech company and this seems like a lame attempt to make up an answer instead of saying- we're solving a different problem on a different timeline. Can't imagine Elon writing something like this 10 years ago.
As an aside, anyone care to speculate on the “secret seat configuration”?
I guess maybe it’s a recliner with feet pointing to the outside (maybe just two seats per row)? That’s the only new configuration I can imagine that would require reshaping the hull.
They keep calling this thing an "airliner." Assuming they ever go into production, they'll definitely sell some units to Saudi princes, but commercial airlines? Nope. Any customer that could afford a seat on this thing could afford to rent a Gulfstream and not have to share it with others.
TLDR: We changed our plane design and lost range, we used ai in helping tweak our engine design to get back our range, we were successful in our computer models.
This article is just another from what are fundamentally hardware companies proclaiming how they're implementing "ai" and it's doing so much to help to gather more stock/venture investors but with no actual substance.
Everything he discusses taking into account are things that airplane/engine manufacturers already do and it doesn't require ai, just some python or god forbid, an excel sheet.
His statement about the relationship between airplane and engine manufacturers is factual correct but so blatantly wrong. You think GE/PW and Boeing/Airbus engineering don't work closely with each other when a new model is being developed? You think either would risk hundreds of millions and years of development without talking to each other? How does anyone take this guy seriously enough to give him millions of dollars?
"This close approach gave rise to mkBoom, our proprietary airplane design software. Initially created in a simpler form for XB-1, mkBoom has evolved significantly and is now pivotal to designing our Overture airliner."
This is the same overture airframe that supposedly had it's final design released in July of 2022? And was supposed to be rolled out in 2025? And have it's first commercial passengers in 2029? (Ref. 1)
But apparently 18 months ago the structure was being redesigned in such a way that caused a 1000 mile range loss (that is described as "subtle" fuselage change)? And in response to that last year they completely redesigned the engines and regained that 1000 miles of lost range... Sure.
More importantly, given the FAA states they a new aircraft takes 5-9 years to certify (Ref 2.) it seems the 2029 target is not viable any longer right? So are you going to tell American or should I?
Agree on most points. However as someone who has worked on new aircraft I can tell you that friction/mis-communication/finger-pointing between airframe and powerplant manufacturer is a huge issue. There is a common saying in the industry, that you should never design a new airframe and a new powerplant at the same time. Each new aircraft certification program should be one or the other
Sure, as there is when any two companies work together but to say they have no ability to communicate performance parameters, that they have no ability to work together, is just wrong.
AKA they're doing what every other aerospace company has been doing for decades, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization [0] with simulation in the loop. If you were to ask them how they're leveraging Design of Experiments I bet it'd be met with "design of what?".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidisciplinary_design_optim...
That doesn't sound good to investors that don't know anything and don't do any due diligence.
Which non-military aircraft have been developed with these methods in the past 20 years?
Boeing 787
I’m a little confused how this differs from standard constraint optimization.
In standard constraint optimization you know the constraints at compile time. In MDO many constraints are generated at runtime and constantly change as you search for solutions.
In MDAO you definitely know all the constraints at compile time, but inequality constraints can be active or inactive as the optimizer progresses.
That's how SNOPT, IPOPT, presumably KNITRO and nonlinear programming optimizers work.
Yes MDAO is "just" constrained nonlinear optimization.
You come up with a model for your thing, which often involves multiple "disciplines" like mass, propulsion, aerodynamics, loads, trajectory/equations of motion, and then usually use some framework to calculate the constraints values and objective value and their gradients
Constraints can very much be dynamic and emergent from complex event chains.
It doesn't, they just want to use a buzzword to make it look like they are doing new and advanced things.
Shhhh we're calling it AI now
On what basis do you think nobody on the team understands DoE?
> Together with a few other optimizations, these tweaks yielded over 1,000mi in increased range—enough that we could now afford a remarkable passenger cabin without sacrificing fuel efficiency or range.
Honestly, the way the narrative reads, they're still sacrificing 1,000mi of range in the interests of an improved cabin experience. They've just found an optimisation that enables them to reach a net neutral state.
Given we're effectively talking about fuel efficiency here, it's hard to imagine airlines wanting an improved cabin vs less fuel consumption. All the incentives are on them already to meet a "barest minimum" cabin experience that they can get away with, because every bit of luxury costs them in numbers of passengers, and fuel costs.
It might be a fad, but the current trend in US public aviation is increasing premium cabins and premium revenue: https://simpleflying.com/why-us-carriers-doubling-down-premi...
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats and are about overcharging for a little extra legroom and service rather than trading off operational flexibility for unique luxury though. Big difference between charging 3x economy rates for 2x the space for a carefully estimated proportion of seats in a mixed configuration (no brainer) and hoping your layout is so good it justifies thirstier, less flexible aircraft to operators (tough sell)...
That said, Boom's customers - if they ever exist - will be a new business class pay extra for supersonic flights category anyway.
> Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats
Most of the profit on a plane is made in business class. If airlines could fly an all-business configuration, they would. The problem is the smallest planes that can do high-paying routes like LON-NYC are bigger than that customer set. So the airline throws in economy seats, often barely breaking even on those, to fill space.
In a world with small airliner planes that can make those transoceanic and transcontinental journeys, I suspect we’ll see more all-business class flights.
Smaller jet aircraft on the same route generally means relatively expensive operating costs: some costs like landing slots and pilots are essentially fixed, whilst others like maintenance, fuel and capital costs don't scale down linearly. The marginal profit on an individual economy class seat might be small, but 100+ of them cover a large portion of the fixed and semi-fixed costs of operating the aircraft, and are relatively easy to fill.
Long range business jets which can comfortably accommodate a typical narrowbody business class cabin exist: nobody is certifying them for all-business class scheduled flights because it wouldn't be profitable to do so; likewise the all-premium 32 seat A318 configuration hasn't been adopted anywhere except the NYC/LON route it didn't really have the range for because it wouldn't be profitable elsewhere. Boom's bet is that supersonic changes that.
> some costs like landing slots
Small detail: most landing slot costs are variable based on aircraft weight.
Landing charges levied on each landing usually have a significant weight component (amongst other variable components like emissions, noise, handling and passenger charges) but the relationship usually isn't linear with passenger capacity. Landing slots required at busier airports to have the right to land at a certain time each week are generally traded between airlines with the slot coordinator's agreement with the value of the slot based mainly on the commercial attractiveness of the time slot.
Absolutely, good point. I don't know why I latched onto charges vs slots.
Another factor in this mix is frequency, which matters a lot, especially to business travellers.
A once-daily supersonic flight might minimize “time in the air” while a once hourly mostly-economy 737 shuttle minimises “time away from home.”
There is one airline that flies all business class. An A321Neo with 76 lie-flat seats, NYC to Paris/Nice/Milan. Random date selection yields $2700 one-way New York to Paris.
https://www.lacompagnie.com/en/about/services
British Airways operated a similar flight between 2009 and 2020: an A318 between LON and NYC with 32 lie-flat seats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_World_London_City
But that's just it - the airlines have finally (lol) realized that a huge price "Delta" (lolx2) between normal cattle class and first class was a mistake.
People aren't usually paying 4x for first, but they will pay $10 more for Y, $30 for Z, etc.
The future of airlines is fully adjustable planes!
Business Class trades well above 3X tourist class.
> Business Class trades well above 3X tourist class.
If you are a tourist searching business class on Google Flights, of course it’s 5-6x more expensive.
True business class / upper class travelers get discounts of 20-50% for J. And no, they’re not using Amex/Chase Travel.
> True business class / upper class travelers get discounts of 20-50% for J. And no, they’re not using Amex/Chase Travel.
What are they using, then?
Corporate discounts
Huh. Where? I work for a company that's not a FAANG but $200B market cap, and what we get through Concur, Spotnana is at most, 5, occasionally 10% below what I see for the same fare class on Expedia. I have never seen anything approaching 20% cheaper, let alone 50%.
It isnt a trend. This is marketing. Thirty years ago, the a380 was pitched as having room for luxury too. The new plane is always going to have more legroom, wider aisles and better air conditioning than anything before. But it never happens. The pitch to actual operators is the square-feet of floorspace and how many seats can be crammed into that space at given price points. Just like concord, this thing only makes sense with quazi-economy seating. Do not expect to nap on a nice lie-flat seat.
> It isnt a trend. This is marketing
They’re citing historic data. It absolutely is a trend that premium travel is an increasing slice of post-Covid American air travel.
Saw a Jet Blue plane wrapped in Peacock livery today… selling the planes themselves as billboards sure does feel like scraping the bottom of the revenue barrel.
That would be an accurate statement if they were being sold for bottom of the barrel prices.
To be fair, modern airliners, even budget ones, are way more comfortable than Concorde. You can visit one in a museum, it's very cramped, and noisier. Concorde had way better service tho.
Forget luxury. Forget speed. Hands down, the best flying experience I've ever had was on a dirty, slow, late and loud C-130. After an announced delay on the ground, I wedged myself between a cargo pallet and the wall, threw a ratchet strap across as a "belt" and passed out on a metal floor with a backpack for a pillow. No in-flight meals. No safety briefs. No entertainment systems. No drink service. Nothing. I don't even remember the takeoff. The only thing anyone said to me was "Uh, sir... We are about to land. You have to get up." THAT is what I want from flying. Give me a bit of peace, a chance to sleep, and I couldn't care less how fast or slow the journey.
I know it's due to safety but I really wish there were an economy version of the lie flat seat. I'd gladly sleep in a set of bunk beds stacked 3-4 high for an 8 hour flight.
You’re describing a lay-flat seat. (If you let them know you don’t want to be disturbed, they won’t.)
Of if you are on Air New Zealand and can't afford business class you can get a Skycouch in Economy. They're pretty great, actually, unless you're over 6ft tall or can't sleep with you knees bent a bit
Are you kidding? On a commercial flight, between the safety briefs, seatbelt warnings, and "turn on/off your devices" there are constant announcements. And the stupid entertainment systems you cannot turn off, or at least that spring to flashing life again after each pointless announcement. I wore my ear defenders on united once, and was woken mid-flight by a steward informing me they were not allowed as i wouldnt be able to hear announcements.
I use Etymotic inside-the-ear passive plugs. They work great and nobody can tell I'm wearing them.
> on united
Yeah I found your problem :P.
> XB-1 is the world’s first independently-developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January, 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people
This is a great headline and very impressive. However, it’s also somewhat puzzling to see the company spend so much investment money to build a small prototype plane that doesn’t resemble a commercial airliner in any way, break the sound barrier 6 times, retire it, and then conclude they’re on their way to delivering commercial supersonic passenger planes in five years
Boom Aero is one of those companies I want to see succeed, but everything I read about them tickles my vaporware senses. Snowing off a one-off prototype that doesn’t resemble the final product in any way (other than speed) is a classic sign of a company spending money to appeal to investors.
Retiring the plane after only a few flights is also a puzzling move. Wouldn’t they be making changes and collecting data as much as possible on their one prototype?
I work in aerospace and I don't find this development strategy unusual prima facie. I don't know if Boom is explicitly doing rapid spiral development, but this is what it would look like from the outside - a development vehicle that doesn't resemble the final vehicle design in many ways, but does have strategically selected commonality to validate and buy down risk on specific subsystems and operational concepts. They may be retiring XB-1 simply because they got the data they needed.
That being said, I share your skepticism of Boom as a company. As far as I know, they still don't have an engine for their production aircraft design.
Yeah.
The demonstrator was to validate some basic concepts they were promoting about being able to achieve supersonic flight without supersonic booms. It achieved that at relatively low cost, and gave them something to brag about, an indication of baseline competence at certifying airframes and possibly ticked off some investor boxes. There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform, so its not surprising they haven't gone to the expense of continuing to fly it. It's not going to be useful for most other stuff they might want to test, apart from perhaps their intended custom engines which are probably years away from being certified for flight tests, never mind hitting performance and reliability targets.
> There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform,
This is key to me.
I'm a layman in Aviation, so I'll unpack that.
The Boom XB-1 demonstrator (1) uses GEJ85: the General Electric J85 engines, as seen on military jets (2).
This is not the desired production jet's "Symphony" engine (3), which at a guess has to be both larger and more efficient?
So whatever is to be learned from the demonstrator, it doesn't tell us much about the final engine design.
In fact, all I know about this desired engine, is that Rolls-Royce isn't making it. (4)
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house? If they're making good progress, why are we hearing about how they're replacing excel as a design tool.
As I said in the other comment:
I'm not an expert, but this seems like the engine is on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure. i.e. Without engines, they have nothing but a glider.
And if Rolls-Royce thinks that it's either not technically or commercially feasible, then who can do it?
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Symphony
4) https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
From [4]: > Rolls-Royce's work over the last few years
So Rolls sank several years of investigation into it before cutting their losses.
From [3]: > Boom aims for production of the engine to begin in 2025 at the Overture factory at Greensboro, North Carolina
Mark your calendar ...
It seems developing a new engine a relatively rare, difficult, expensive, and risky endeavor in aviation. Notice none of the aircraft companies make their own, right? It's CFM, PW, and RR.
But Boom has a bunch of propulsion engineer openings so it looks like they're really going for it.
The saying in aviation is "don't develop a new airframe and a new powerplant at the same time".
Sure there are counterexamples, but they have good reasons to think that this is more than double the difficulty of developing one of these parts. And that the engine will take longer.
I wonder what kind of liability it would be to sell a one-off prototype plane like that. Guessing it would also have more value has a model in the lobby or on a pole outside headquarters one day than they would earn in selling it.
It's hard to see why anyone would pick an airplane like this over a surplus, demilitarized fighter jet (only one of them has spare parts)
The HP.115 [1] and BAC 221 [2] were not exact scale replicas of Concorde.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_HP.115 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Delta_2#BAC_221
My take is that they felt like they were already pushing their luck with the prototype and didn't want to scare investors away when it inevitably crashed.
I share your skepticism, especially with their timeline. It has been some time since I looked at them closely, but they originally pitched developing their own supersonic capable turbofan to power their eventual production model. Especially with such a small team that seemed overly ambitious to me.
Hah.... in the back of my mind: announce they're going to crash it before the fly it.
"This flight we're validating our model by pushing the real world to the limit. It should explode about 38s into the test and crash. We've cleared the expected area"
Hopefully the plane is autonomous
The market for Boom is not commercial passenger flights. So much time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc. that the flight speed is not a big deal. Existing commercial passenger jets could already go faster without going supersonic and save some time, but it doesn't matter. Even if you fly commercial passenger jets at the absolutely face-melting Mach 3.3 of the SR-71, you don't really save enough time to matter. The maximum speed in flight doesn't do anything to address ground delays.
> time is wasted with security, boarding, taxi-ing, waiting at the destination for a gate to unload, etc.
Airlines can optimise for this. Digital ID virtually eliminates security lines. Paying up for gate, t/o and landing spots takes care of the latter. There is a cost tradeoff for service in the airline business. An all-business airline flying Booms would almost necessarily have to pay up to negate these issues. (That or fly out of the FBO terminal.)
Airlines do not dictate airport security.
You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money. It doesn't matter, unless you're going to make flights from nowhere to nowhere. Doesn't sound like a business strategy to me.
> Airlines do not dictate airport security
Airlines absolutely choose whether to participate in various programs. Digital ID was cited for a reason.
And in some cases, the airlines have substantial control—Delta One has a separate security line at JFK.
> You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money
You don’t. You outbid someone else for the existing ones.
Participation in a program does not dictate whether any specific passenger or non-specific passenger can get through TSA in any fixed amount of time. TSA may unilaterally impose any security measures upon any passenger of a commercial flight and may also unilaterally prohibit any passenger from boarding a commercial flight.
No such restriction exists upon private jets
> And in some cases, the airlines have substantial control—Delta One has a separate security line at JFK.
I'm actually surprised more airports don't have VIP level gates that the airlines can pay a premium for allowing them to charge a premium to their passengers. It'd be interesting to see where the price could be that would guarantee enough passengers willing to pay the premium for much reduced airport headaches.
There’s probably a classist risk to this (recall the uproar over the residential building in NYC that had separate entrances for different unit classes), let alone the logistics are needed at whole-airport level to support it which is difficult to retrofit.
Just build an entirely different terminal instead of shoeing it into the same building as the terminals for the plebes. Out of sight, out of mind.
The classist risk is already there with the pricing they have for first class seats. By making first class only planes, you can have economy only planes like Spirit. Then nobody would be complaining about first class since nobody would see first class. I see no downsides with this concept!
Ah, I was referring to loading the same plane from different gates, which I’ve been told exists at some airports (boarding from business/first lounge one floor above the standard gate)
That's what you would consider classist? How about a lavatory for use only for first class. How about "closing" off the first class part of the plane with a little curtain? None of this suggests to me the airlines are trying to not be classist
> I'm actually surprised more airports don't have VIP level gates
They all do. Delta’s is branded VIP services. They’ll meet you at the curb and shuttle you behind security and in a car to your plane.
But at that point, in most cases, fly private.
> You cannot simply add gates to airports with even an infinite pile of money.
I was once on a short internal US flight. We recognised an "elder statesman" politician, a Senator who owned property in the area of the city that we were going to.
He was seated at the front, and was given the opportunity to leave the aircraft a minute before anyone else - no luggage beyond a briefcase. Of course, by the time we deplaned he was nowhere to be seen, by then he was likely in the back his car already. Who needs a separate gate when the VIP can be guided through ahead of the rest, through some usually-closed door?
That may be true for domestic coast-to-coast flights, but not for transoceanic ones across the Atlantic, or especially the Pacific, or north-south across hemispheres, that can take 8+ hours. Flight time is a higher portion of the total travel time in those cases, and seems like the main market for Boom, especially if they initially target Business Class flyers who do those kinds of trips regularly.
Boom XB-1 did 750 mph air speed. If I've got an 8 hour flight at 561 mph in an A380 that's a reduction to 5.984 hours when I move to the Boom XB-1. Who cares about saving 1.1 hours on a transatlantic flight. There is a reason why Concorde's cruise speed was 1,341 mph.
So when Boom makes a commercial airliner that hits 1000+ mph with the same availability and turnaround time as a typical passenger plane then I'll pay attention. Until then, it's for rich people who can buy their own plane.
XB-1 is only the demonstrator. They aim to produce commercial airline that can cruise at 1.7 Mach. NYC to London in 3.30h instead of 6h.
Rich people can already buy private jet that is much more comfortable than supersonic one.
https://boomsupersonic.com/overture
8 hours - 5.984 hours = 1.1 hours? My math works out to just over 2 hours of time saved.
My mistake, it is 2 hours of time saved.
Not disagreeing with you at all.
What is the market for Boom?
I see you never flew from LAX to ICN.
It's also largely PR guff. The first privately-developed supersonic aircraft was the Northrop N-156F, forerunner of the F-5, that first flew in 1959. Funded entirely from company funds with no military contract. And it went supersonic in its first flight with no drama.
In fact the chase plane for the Boom XB-1 is a T-38, derived from the N-156F. It can outrun the XB-1.
I'm not sure how strictly privately developed the N-156F is given you could easily argue that reuse of design, knowledge and relationships from existing contracts saved them a lot of money.
I think part of it was that they were testing a new aerodynamic design that eliminates or minimizes sonic boom, so they can go supersonic over land almost immediately after takeoff, and operate over populated land routes. It makes sense to test that kind of thing with the smallest possible model first, then see if you can scale it up to passenger size without losing that quiet acceleration. Their timeline for doing that may be optimistic, but what they're doing makes sense.
The XB-1 doesn't have any boom reduction shaping. That's the NASA X-59, though that aircraft is pretty much a dead-end in that it's not scalable to a passenger configuration.
The XB-1 made use of an atmospheric trick to minimise boom propagation to ground level on one test flight, so well-known in fact that Concorde sometimes used it to accelerate as it coasted-out without an audible ground-level boom. Unfortunately that trick runs out at about M1.17.
Their immediate goal is to get the next round of funding. Viewed from this lense it makes a little more sense.
> At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI.
As an engineer I find "leveraging AI" to be a very troubling idea. I'd want to know detailed specifics of just what management believes AI should be used for before I accepted such a job.
As a passenger, I damn well don't want to fly on an airplane designed with software that can't count the number of bs in blueberry.
I listened to the podcast that the founder did about a week ago. It reminded me of how retired folks in the middle class open a restaurant when they don't know anything about running a restaurant. Except this dude isn't investing $1M on a McDonalds, he's investing hundreds of millions.
He seemed almost proud of his inexperience, and nearly said that it gave him an "advantage" because existing engineers weren't willing to "innovate."
This is a common story in the startup world. Outsiders are able to break free from the mould; its harder to innovate when everything you do is already shaped by best practices, and your career is highly dependent on your peers’ approval. Doing things differently is a high risk move that few are willing to make.
Incidentally, Ray Kroc, the guy who made McDonalds the $200B company it is today, didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. His closest experience was selling blenders.
SpaceX did Falcon-1 a few times cheaper than assumed, and that was the first aerospace experience for Elon. Turned out impressively good...
> We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance.
Awesome stuff! Allows large scale exploration across all dimensions of plane design to jointly optimize all components and their interactions.
Boom’s potential customers wouldn’t be able to put more seats on their planes even if they want to. I suppose the targeted performance affords very little margin for customization
So they can script their design software then. In the modern era I'd consider this table stakes for any big engineering project.
I wonder if they run this through an optimizer then?
Anyone know what their simulation stack might be using? From the modest amount I know, mechanical engineering usually dislike their CAD tool and Ansys FEA simulations don't always converge. So how on earth are they simulating an entire aircraft with a single command?
When they say simulate, so they actually mean just using ideal mathematical models in Matlab?
I work in this space. Most likely it is a huge conglomeration of commercial CFD, FEA, and CAD softwares, custom in-house codes, and empirical aircraft design curves all stitched together with some python.
It's weird how analog the entire field of aerospace has been - I remember reading articles in the 2000s (and before), of how computational simulations a are going to unlock crazy new never before seen designs, controllable via novel control surfaces only possible thanks to novel control surfaces whose position is determined via literal supercomputers onboard the plane. And how X-planes are going to become unnecessary, because everything a wind tunnel test could tell you can be predicted via simulation.
Fast forward to today, there's been no aerodynamically novel aircraft developed in the past decades, and from what I read, wind tunnel and glider tests are still necessary to validate aerodynamics during complex conditions, like manuevering.
Computational simulations have been involved in aircraft design for decades. However, at some point you still have to verify the simulations with real world tests. I think (as a non-expert) the main reason no aerodynamically novel aircraft have been developed lately is because we have essentially optimised designs, already. To be clear, I am not saying that we can't do better. I am saying that the manufacturing (and other) cost of incremental improvements is large and the benefit is small. For commercial aircraft (as an example only), it is really hard to beat a tube with wings for the lowest cost of moving large numbers of people or volumes of cargo. Military aircraft with specialised roles are a bit more varied, and a lot more expensive to build and fly.
I think there's also a lot of "if we don't change too much, we have a pretty good chance to not face issues getting the aircraft certified", and "if we change the aircraft too much it'll cause issues where airports have to alter their infrastructure" (which is relevant for things like the blended wing research that's popped up recently).
There's a ton of legacy in overall airline/aircraft operations that discourages big changes.
It happens every now and again on here: someone comes up with like a 2% improvement in aerodynamics, and people are unimpressed. Meanwhile airlines are basically scrambling to get it rolled into their next-gen purchases because it's the biggest improvement in costs in a decade.
A 2% improvement that only costs 2% more to manufacture, sure.
A 2% improvement that costs 200% more to manufacture would be nonsensical to seriously propose.
You cannot possibly know that without knowing the operational lifetime of a plane and it's expected return. An airline doesn't buy a plane planning to break even on the purchase cost, for example.
Which basically proves my original point.
Do you not understand what the word manufacture means?
It literally doesn’t matter what the “operational lifetime” or “expected return” is if it costs 200% more to manufacture for only 2% improvements.
It won’t ever get far enough in the design process for it to even be an issue.
Setting aside that you pulled that number out of your ass to argue against it, if something produces 400X it's purchase cost over it's operational life time, a 2% improvement takes that to 408X it's purchase cost for only a 2X increase in initial outlay, meaning it pays for itself 4 fold.
But very few innovations have that sort of effect on manufacturing cost to start with.
This doesn’t make sense as a reply.
How is your own opinion, on another user’s example number, even relevant enough to be “setting aside” in the first place?
From the first paragraph:
"It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people—compared to the hundreds or even thousands that would have been employed by a traditional big aerospace company. And we did this with roughly a tenth of the budget that would traditionally be required. People have marveled at how our small team of just 50 people at Boom designed, built, and successfully flew the XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. And we did this with about a tenth the capital as any other supersonic program."
Is the repetition a sign of AI writing the article?
What is Boom's current plan to make the engines that they need? How is that going?
IIRC, the last news was that Rolls-Royce noped out of that (1), which is an indicator that it's either not technically or commercially feasible.
Are they still planning to design the engines in-house?
I'm not an expert, but this seems like it's on the critical path to success, and also high chance of failure.
i.e. Without engines, they have nothing, and if Rolls-Royce can't do it, then who can?
1) https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...
Looks like investors and potential employees are asking if Boom is fast growth tech company and this seems like a lame attempt to make up an answer instead of saying- we're solving a different problem on a different timeline. Can't imagine Elon writing something like this 10 years ago.
I always thought his experience at Groupon made him a master of Reed Solomon error correction.
I saw Reed Solomon codes were invented for fast, accurate missile guidance and (in my head) that's the connection I made to his super sonic startup
As an aside, anyone care to speculate on the “secret seat configuration”?
I guess maybe it’s a recliner with feet pointing to the outside (maybe just two seats per row)? That’s the only new configuration I can imagine that would require reshaping the hull.
I'll be very disappointed if the big secret isn't the smart-fella-fart-smella configuration.
The key take away is to embed software developers everywhere in the development process.
Which makes perfect sense. Software is about automating things. And the more you automate, the faster you go.
A bit like how Jane Street operates I think.
They keep calling this thing an "airliner." Assuming they ever go into production, they'll definitely sell some units to Saudi princes, but commercial airlines? Nope. Any customer that could afford a seat on this thing could afford to rent a Gulfstream and not have to share it with others.
TLDR: We changed our plane design and lost range, we used ai in helping tweak our engine design to get back our range, we were successful in our computer models.
This article is just another from what are fundamentally hardware companies proclaiming how they're implementing "ai" and it's doing so much to help to gather more stock/venture investors but with no actual substance.
Everything he discusses taking into account are things that airplane/engine manufacturers already do and it doesn't require ai, just some python or god forbid, an excel sheet.
His statement about the relationship between airplane and engine manufacturers is factual correct but so blatantly wrong. You think GE/PW and Boeing/Airbus engineering don't work closely with each other when a new model is being developed? You think either would risk hundreds of millions and years of development without talking to each other? How does anyone take this guy seriously enough to give him millions of dollars?
"This close approach gave rise to mkBoom, our proprietary airplane design software. Initially created in a simpler form for XB-1, mkBoom has evolved significantly and is now pivotal to designing our Overture airliner."
This is the same overture airframe that supposedly had it's final design released in July of 2022? And was supposed to be rolled out in 2025? And have it's first commercial passengers in 2029? (Ref. 1)
But apparently 18 months ago the structure was being redesigned in such a way that caused a 1000 mile range loss (that is described as "subtle" fuselage change)? And in response to that last year they completely redesigned the engines and regained that 1000 miles of lost range... Sure.
More importantly, given the FAA states they a new aircraft takes 5-9 years to certify (Ref 2.) it seems the 2029 target is not viable any longer right? So are you going to tell American or should I?
Ref. 1 https://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2022/American-Airlines...
Ref. 2 https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certific...
Agree on most points. However as someone who has worked on new aircraft I can tell you that friction/mis-communication/finger-pointing between airframe and powerplant manufacturer is a huge issue. There is a common saying in the industry, that you should never design a new airframe and a new powerplant at the same time. Each new aircraft certification program should be one or the other
Sure, as there is when any two companies work together but to say they have no ability to communicate performance parameters, that they have no ability to work together, is just wrong.